


Extrasensory

by zacian



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Angst and Humor, But Mostly Humor, F/M, Implied Relationships, Post-Canon, doing pokemon things, pokemon being pokemon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23432164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacian/pseuds/zacian
Summary: Bede is good enough at keeping things under wraps. His Pokémon hasn’t learned—or doesn’t care to.
Relationships: (one-sided) Hop/Gloria, Beet | Bede/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 23
Kudos: 122





	Extrasensory

**Author's Note:**

> this is a gift for my dear friend eryka, out of gratitude for them doing gorgeous fanart of Past Due and just for being an amazing person in general <3
> 
> im not really used to writing this kind of dynamic but it was super fun. im a postwick stan first and human second but this ship is growing on me. i also love incorporating pokemon into a story whenever possible so doing that here was incredibly satisfying. this is my first foray into bederia so go easy on me (just kidding don't actually)
> 
> enjoy!

* * *

His Hatterene is on edge whenever Gloria comes around. The thing about it is that Hatterene is well-behaved for her species and doesn’t usually get on edge unless she’s in the presence of a threat, and despite numerous attempts made on his life Gloria has never intimidated him. She’s been a nuisance and a roadblock, certainly, but he’s more afraid of Opal than he is of her.

It makes sense, though, because eight stone soaking wet but with a voice to rival an Exploud’s, Hatterene would be justified in doubling the girl over with a migraine or knocking her unconscious. She never would attack unprompted, but even when Bede looks imploringly and thinks _Please, Hatterene_ , harnessing the telepathic link he’s sure they must have, she only goes on looking at her with an odd festering cross of agitation and interest.

What is so fascinating about the girl that Hatterene pulses and glares but does not go on the offensive? She’s not much to look at, and Bede has expressed as much to his Pokémon, chiding her gently, and Hatterene has stared all the while with a gaze half-lidded and halfway to bored.

Bede figures it out in a sudden streak of brilliance, his skills of deduction cresting an all-time high, when he watches from the sidelines where he’s content to sit from time to time to escape the heavy bustle of the crowds.

He watches Gloria flit back and forth among the people, chattering and laughing in her ear-splitting way, afloat on feet too clumsy to be of a fairy but too quick to be anything but. He follows the chaotic trail of her footsteps as much as he can keep up until she stops on her toes on a screeching halt where her best friend shows up and presses a hand to her shoulder and their smiles are so synchronized they look almost rehearsed and Bede swallows sharply and holds his breath. Hatterene makes a low chittering noise and waves her tentacle and he realizes—she has not been reacting to Gloria but to Bede’s own reactions to her, deeply attuned to her Trainer’s every feeling despite his pride in keeping them locked down.

Hatterene croons and lifts her arm to stroke the top of Bede’s head. “What, you—?!” He recoils but her hand is gingerly caressing the side of his face in what he can only guess is a learned gesture of comfort, almost familial and just as embarrassing, like a protective mother’s touch on a child much too old to still need it.

_Oh_ , he thinks, glowering up at her, _that’s what this is, is it?_

Hatterene doesn’t respond, just goes on tapping his cheek lightly with her bizarro fingers, and Bede starts to reconsider both her character and the idea that she might be able to hear his thoughts after all.

When he turns back to look at Gloria again, she’s gone, and so is Hop. When Hatterene wraps her arm around his waist to hug him close, he doesn’t squirm away.

* * *

“Thoroughbred, is he?”

Gloria’s attempts at humor are as grating as her attempts at friendship, or whatever she wants to call this strange union of former foes turned rivals turned colleagues. Bede makes a point of not answering as she kneels and joins him in doting on his Rapidash.

To Bede’s dismay his Pokémon is not as nervous as he when Gloria’s fingers glide through his mane and scratch a spot on his neck that apparently really needed scratching. He sinks his neck low, eyes starting to shut, and Bede watches with dull curiosity as she brings her hand through a knot and Rapidash doesn’t so much as wince. They don’t know each other well, having only met on the pitch, but he shifts into her touch like it makes no difference whose hand is on him.

“He likes me.” Gloria grins, tilting back on her knees. “Usually I’ve got to toss ‘em a scrap of food for them to warm up to me like this.”

“He must smell the stench of Postwick on you.” It’s one of his weaker quips. _Get a grip, Bede_. “He isn’t fond of most people.”

“Like Trainer, like Pokémon, eh?” She kneads an ear between her thumb and index finger and Rapidash melts. “He a rescue, too?”

Bede knows better than to dignify her with a reply but she’s so spot-on it scares him for the briefest moment. He runs a hand down the opposite side of Rapidash’s neck. “Cheap shot,” he says, laughs dryly. Rapidash whinnies halfheartedly.

“Not a joke,” Gloria says, looking between Bede and Rapidash like she’s sizing them up. “I can sense it. He’s a skittish one. The Mudbray back home only get that way when they’ve broken a leg or been attacked by a Nickit or some such.”

“Fancy yourself an expert, then?” If Hatterene were here she’d smite him for the hostility that radiates in waves from his person and slithers from his teeth. It’s senseless and he knows it but the girl has a stranglehold and won’t let go and if only he could buck her off the way Rapidash can, but Rapidash doesn’t seem bothered by her in the slightest.

“Cripes, I’m not asking for your _life story_ —”

“He was given to me when I was a child. A reward for good behavior. They never did tell me what happened to him.”

Rapidash’s breathing is slow and if he registers Bede’s words he makes no show of the fact. Gloria is looking from across his dozing form and her eyes are questioning like she takes him for an experiment of some kind, a thing she can poke and prod till she gets the answers she wants and creates a story from them. There is no smile on her lips, though, and no rumble in her throat like she’s readying to jeer. Small mercies.

“You ever give him a name?” she asks. “Or did he come with one, or…?”

“No,” Bede says, “neither. I don’t name my Pokémon.” 

“Figures,” Gloria puffs. “I didn’t take you for the type. My Rillaboom’s named Jasmine—I call her Jazz for short. She’s a sweet one, I think the name suits her well. Jasmine is my favorite kind of tea, you know. I don’t drink it often, but when I was a kid we used to get...”

Bede doesn’t remember asking, but there’s something tolerable about her rambling, something lilting despite the coarseness of her dialect and the deadening of his intellect that her sparse vocabulary imparts. He listens more than he wants to, more than he should, his breathing syncing with his Pokémon’s. It spikes when her hand ghosts over his where they both flutter on the valley between Rapidash’s shoulder blades, but she takes no notice and Bede thinks that he shouldn’t, either.  
  


* * *

Opal must have been a Psychic-type in a past life, and one of a nasty disposition. A Malamar, perhaps, one half shadow just as one half clairvoyance. The irony that she came to lead a ring of fairies in this life.

The pull of her withered lips from the curtain of steam that rises from her teacup gives the impression of a windstorm about to break through lazy cloud. _Oh, no_ , Bede thinks, _no, no, no, whatever this is, you’d better not—_

“I see that you’ve been partaking in more of the Champion’s matches as of late.” She scoops a speck of sugar into her drink, watches it sift to the bottom like silt. “How nice of you to indulge her.”

“How nice indeed.” His teeth are barely gritted. If he clamps down too hard she’ll sense his fear and pounce on it, snare him in her makeshift trap.

Her Alcremie reaches for the heavy cream, glancing at him with a loving scorn in her red-coal eyes. _Not you, too._

“Hoping to get a better sense of her strategy so you can defeat her? That’s my boy. Always ambling one step ahead towards greatness. Always so practical.” She returns to his gaze with a serpentine droop in her eyes, bringing the cup to rest against her Cupid’s bow. He can’t see her mouth behind it but he knows she’s smiling.

“She hasn’t _got_ much of a strategy,” Bede says, leaning back. His tea is still too hot to drink so he traces a line up and down the handle. Nice and easy, the tea will cool off in no time and so will he. “She’s a reckless thing. I don’t even know _how_ she got the Championship. That’s what I’m trying to understand.”

Opal sips noisily. Alcremie follows with her own drink, a bite-sized mug of chai. They are alike in the strangest of ways. Gloria might have been on to something.

“Well,” Opal says, setting her cup down with a tender clink, “you’ll never get very far like that. You’ve got to get to know the girl _off_ the pitch, too. On a more intimate level.” Bede gapes. “I know a lovely brunch spot just out of the city center in Wyndon, and if you’d like me to arrange a date—”

" _Miss Opal!_ ” He’s not yelling; Opal would strike him down like the hand of Hatterene if he raised his voice to a volume higher than the distressed whisper he croaks in. “It is not—not—” He hasn’t got the words for it, not right now. There are a few things: he’s never so much as looked at a girl or a boy or anyone in _that_ way; she is his rival, and his most vexing one to date; and he has seen the tremors of something he can’t quite place pass between her and her best rival, her last remaining fragment of home. He has watched the brassy gold fall hopelessly after her and, despite his inexperience in the matter, placed it strictly outside of the boundaries of platonic. It would be unbecoming of him to intrude. Assuming, of course, that his affections lay with her in the first place.

“Not like that?” Opal finishes. “My apologies for assuming. I only thought that, if it were, you might like to know a piece about girls from someone who wooed many in her day.” She sighs softly, circles a gnarled finger around the rim of her cup. “But I suppose…” And she straightens as she begins to stand. She is slow in her movements, all the time, but he doesn’t recall her ever being this glacial.

Alcremie looks at him with something like judgment in her darling baby-doll eyes. 

Silently, he acquiesces, succumbing to her check and mate. “...Go on.”

He sips unhurriedly at his Earl Grey, feigning adolescent boredom. He’s never tried so hard to fight back a smile at an old woman regaling tales of ballroom dancing.

* * *

It’s always a big event when a newcomer to the region takes on any one of Galar’s elite Trainers, and an even bigger one when the exhibition match happens to be between them and the Champion. This one looks like it’s shaping up to be disastrously entertaining, or just disastrous, and Bede is fine with either.

He is less thrilled to be seated next to Hop. There’s not much to be said between them. Hop fidgets with the collar of his jacket, crosses and uncrosses his legs, and when in short bursts he makes conversation with Bede it’s clear that they are linked only by their proximity to Gloria, and Hop has more to say about her anyway. 

He cheers her on a lot more enthusiastically, too, his awkwardness forgotten as soon as the stage is set and Gloria is chopping her poor victim to bits with her team. On their third slot, the man from Unova summons a snarling Hydreigon, and Gloria calls for her Flapple— _since when has she got a Flapple?_ —that rears and hisses in the least intimidating way he’s ever seen of a Dragon-type.

The man goes for a Dynamax. It’s unorthodox, usually saved for the last Pokémon on each team, but Gloria certainly isn’t complaining as she trails behind with her usual bloodlust. Hydreigon’s fearsome heads shake out of tandem and blow smoke and growl lowly, and there’s something off about it, the way its nostrils flare and its necks bob like it’s retching to expel something lodged in its spasming chest.

Gigantamax Flapple can hold its own, though, and their face-off is rapturous to behold, butting heads and sinking fangs deep into pebbled scale. But Hydreigon starts to thrash and convulse as if speared through when Flapple nearly does it in, wracked with frenzy and gnashing teeth, and the smoke builds thick and black to the ceiling of the stadium. Its Trainer commands it to do something Bede can’t quite make out but Hydreigon is long past making any sense of it either, and it grunts and spits till its attacks spark and dribble unbidden from its maws. Something bursts from the great head’s teeth, and Bede shields his face from the flashing light just quickly enough to save his eyes and recoup in time to see the shock of white ice fissure up Flapple’s chest and throat and crystallize under its chin.

Its cry is cut short when the shards piece together there at the high point. The explosion of yellowed light signals the end of this match but Flapple, down to size, doesn’t return to its ball. It’s a small Pokémon, Bede realizes, hadn’t noticed _how_ small until he sees Gloria’s panicked limbs and body over its shrunken frame.

“Get up,” she screams, gripping under its torso and heaving, “come on, get _up!_ ” It’s clear that she’s grasping at dead weight. Hop sees it too, white-knuckled and shouting on his feet.

The man from Unova is shouting now as well, in his native tongue, frightened and pacing. Hydreigon belches smog that chokes the stands and just barely muffles the many screams and by the time its Trainer has brought it with shaking hands and a click back into its ball most of them have cleared out. Bede thinks he should stand, too, the way Hop is, should turn heel and run, but Gloria’s hands are at Flapple’s neck and he can see the pale blue following up her arms from her palms from his place in the front row.

* * *

Bede knows he has no right to be there in the waiting room and his presence is sorely recognized as out of place, the way he sits with his hands in his lap and avoids eye contact though no eyes fall anywhere near him. He is a personal invitee of the Champion nonetheless and he should make an effort to win her good graces if he is to remain in good standing with the League and the fates and with Opal, especially. 

He is terribly glad his Hatterene is not beside him, because Hop is sat next to Gloria with his hand rubbing diligently at her back, and the only coherent (if entirely irrational) thought Bede has is that he wishes Hop would _go away_ even for the shortest moment. He has the clearest reason to be there, and Bede wouldn’t be of much use to her, but the feeling prickles hotly up his arms, making its home.

In between staring at the hard shine of the floor he takes note of her from the corner of his eye. Her face is puffy and blotchy from crying. He’s never seen her cry before tonight. It’s an ugly thing and makes his gut wrench helplessly, the peak and the aftermath, and he hopes that Flapple is okay in the other room if only so he won’t have to bear witness to another round. The Unovan man had come to apologize and to say some other things but he’d been ushered away by nurses when Gloria had spotted him, and probably for the best, for his sake, to spare him having his eyes gouged out by her little thumbs. 

Hop gets up every once in a while with the passage of time, retrieving water and holding the cup still when Gloria’s hands nearly spill it, talking to the nurse, sometimes just standing and sitting again with no discernible purpose. His movements are frayed and an unusual hesitation moves through the jerk of his sides and his arms when he leans against her, when his hands hover over the jut of her shoulders and her waist and never settle on any one place.

They’re called down the corridor a little while later. Bede can’t say how long exactly. He sits and stares and his legs jolt in place before Hop turns and gives him a gentle half-smile and a nod of his head, an invitation of another kind.

She’s all right, says the nurse. She doesn’t look it, curled into a tight ball on the table, bruises glittering like snowmelt on her fleshy underbelly, but the rise and fall of her ribs is stable enough. Gloria places a hand on the arc of her right wing and Hop mirrors her, steepling his palm over her knuckles.

Flapple’s breathing is labored and her eyelids are twitching, but miracle that she’s moving at all, and Bede is glad to see it. He touches at the back of her neck and she stirs, minutely, curling into his hand. He’s not her Trainer, and she must know it, but she relaxes like she trusts this stranger enough to know he would never do her harm.

“Has she got a name?” he asks, the first thing he’s said all evening.

“Darjeeling,” Gloria says, “although _I_ would’ve named her Bramble.” Her laugh, when it comes, is louder and fuller than Hop’s. His hand flinches away and comes to rest on the other wing.

Can’t change the nickname of a traded or a gifted Pokémon. That is one of the rules, and Gloria abides by it.

Darjeeling steadies under Hop’s touch, too, seems almost more pleased by the stroke of his thumb over her craggy scales than by Bede’s if he’s not imagining things. He very well might be.

“She’s a beauty,” Bede says. He’s hoping it’ll lighten the mood, because Hop, maybe for the first time in his life, is not speaking, and someone has to. “She’s also strong to have withstood an attack like that.”

He looks to Gloria, not hiding it this time behind the flicker of his lashes, and she meets his gaze unafraid. Her eyes are pink and watery as if she’s trying like mad not to cry again, but when Bede holds her still with the unwavering, grounded coil of his stare, she gives him the smallest of smiles.

“She was raised well.” It’s Hop, and Bede nearly starts. “We are lucky, though. Nurse said she was wheeled in just in the nick of time.”

Bede nods, and Gloria moves to hug Hop, patting him once, twice, three times on the back. He had been the first to react, the one responsible for her being alive and in one piece, raising his voice over the din of the panic while Bede only sat and watched through slowed and swimming vision.

“Thank you,” she says, looking from Hop to Bede as she pulls from the former’s embrace. “Both of you.” She turns to Darjeeling, petting the ridge of her spine with a delicacy he’s never seen. “I’ll be okay from here, boys. I’ve got water and snacks and I plan on camping in for the night, or however long it takes before she’s ready to go.”

Hop protests, makes to stay with her, but she shushes him, grinning in the kindest way she can. She sends them off, and Bede says something resembling a goodbye. He repeats it to Hop when they’re out in the empty fluorescence of the corridor and close to the swinging doors, but Hop stays him with a hand on his arm.

“Um,” he says, bereft of his usual eloquence. “Thank you, Bede.”

Bede doesn’t know what to call the blown-out set of Hop’s eyes, the curve of his brows down towards the weak lift of his smile, but it looks familiar. “I haven’t done much of anything.” 

Hop shakes his head. “I don’t think anyone would’ve expected you to come with us to the Pokémon Center tonight. I think she—well, I think she appreciates it a lot more than you know. Um. And I…” He presses fingers into the back of his neck, looking away from the blinding wash of the lights above. “I like seeing her happy. She’s my best friend, so of course I would. So. If you could be there for her even more in the future, she’d appreciate it. I think.”

Here it comes again, the awful aura of emotion. What is it this time? Guilt, or something like it. Only an hour ago he’d been wishing for the boy’s vanishment and now he’s faltering before the hurt barely hidden behind his kindly smile. Gloria is the only thing that connects them, if by the thinnest thread, and he won’t sever the link. He is not that cruel.

“Right. Yes.” His head tilts forward of its own accord, down to where Hop stands a good deal shorter than him. “I suppose I can do that.”

Hop’s smile unfolds even wider before they part ways though the glassy sheen doesn’t dissolve from his eyes. “Take care,” he says on his departure, and Bede knows the instruction is not meant only for him.

* * *

He gets a call a few days later and picks up a mite too quickly, inciting laughter from Opal. He is the Champion’s choice for today. She's rebounded and is out for blood again and his is the first she wants, for some reason. It's an honor and he groans and makes a show of rubbing his face with both hands where Opal can see.

She smiles knowingly, pryingly. He scowls at the Great Ball in his hand, debates leaving it perched on the counter, and then puts it in his bag with the others. He stops the door shy of slamming on his way out when he remembers Opal is still inside, looks behind him as he closes it quietly, and barely tamps down his boyish grin as he hails a cab to Wyndon.

* * *

“Your Hatterene doesn’t like me much.”

She’s just noticed, blast it, and there goes Bede’s blood pressure along with his poker face. 

He’s kept Hatterene away from her since an incident where the Pokémon thought it would be an absolute riot to nudge him in her direction with all the subtlety of a raging Rhyperior and she’d caught sight of it and laughed. He could’ve sworn he saw her bat her eyes at him right after but his mind must have been playing tricks on him or Hatterene might have painted an illusion for his torment. She is maleficent like that.

Now, though, he’s pulled her back onto his team after keeping the traitor well out of her sight for a long while. Gloria insists that they play together, her Pokémon and his, because her Indeedee seems awfully cozy with his Hatterene. He’s taken a liking to her, she tells him, and gives her signature wink. This time he’s sure he’s not seeing things.

“She doesn’t _dis_ like you,” Bede says. Hatterene is wiggling her tentacle at Indeedee in what looks to be either a courtship display or a lure into making him her lunch. “She’s just fickle.”

Darjeeling yawns beside Gloria, nuzzling against her leg. It feels a bit strange, having her here, but it’s hardly the Pokémon’s fault. It’s hardly anyone’s fault.

He leans down and pets her head. She opens her eyes like she expects someone else to be there when she does, but when she sees that it’s Bede she hums appreciatively.

“All your other Pokémon have taken a shine to me, but that one still makes eyes like she wants to grind me into a pulp,” Gloria says. “If you wanna know what _I_ think,” (he doesn’t), “I think Hatterene knows I fancy you, and she’s being a real monster about it.”

Can Hatterene produce auditory hallucinations? Bede is choking on his own spit, and he thinks _What would Opal do?_ for one horrifying moment before he composes himself to gawk at her.

“Pardon?” he brays.

“You heard me. I fancy you, and I’m pretty sure you fancy me, too, so if we like each other, like-like each other, I think Hatterene of all Pokémon would’ve picked up on it.” She says it so casually, so matter-of-factly, like it hardly means anything.

Hatterene doesn’t seem to notice them. More likely she’s just ignoring them, disinterested in anything that isn’t Indeedee at the moment, because the raw emotion coming off of them in waves must be too potent for her _not_ to feel.

Bede’s mouth is sandpaper-dry, cottony and swollen. He opens it, closes it, opens it again. “You’re _pretty sure_ I’ve got feelings for you? Romantic feelings?”

Gloria rubs at her eye with the hook of a knuckle. “It’s alright if you don’t like me like that,” she says. “I just thought, you know, with how much you’ve been hanging around…”

Darjeeling chirrups inquisitively, lifting her head, and when Bede looks to her he can think only of one thing. That, now, is shattered.

“I do,” Bede says plainly. 

“Figures. I’m right, as always.”

Small, unyielding brick wall of a girl, she looks at him through barely narrowed eyes, almost taunting him, almost laughing. Her smile is sharp and curls up like vine climbing unwelcome and rampaging, and if he prunes it he knows it will only grow back that much faster.

The smile is an invitation of its own kind, one that she extends only to him. It would be terribly rude of him not to accept.

“Can I kiss you?” He doesn’t think she’d care if he leaned in and did it himself, wordlessly and like they do in films, but he is learning manners and proper conduct with a lady though he would never call her that and it is clear that she is the farthest thing from one, but—beggars can’t be choosers. He hopes moreover that his hand at chivalry might cloak the thrumming in his throat and chest and the sweat beading on his palms, but by the flash in Gloria’s eyes as she looks him over almost too quickly to detect, he’s doing a poor job.

Her grin ruptures into a challenge. “Be weirder if you didn’t, at this point.”

The laughter comes only when he does kiss her, stutters forward and presses his mouth to hers. It darts out in muffled staccato and he almost regrets the decision until she stills his face in one hand and abruptly stops making the hated noise. He is vaguely aware that his lips are drawn tightly together and that they don’t budge when she kisses back, or tries to. Her lips are chapped and cold and he almost regrets it again, but she’s better at it, more at ease, and it’s not as painful as he thought it might be. Easy enough, he thinks as she pulls away, cringing and wiping her mouth pointedly with the back of her bare hand. 

“Bede, that was _grim_.”

He feels his face flush and whether it’s out of anger or embarrassment or some mixture of the two he doesn’t get a chance to figure before he blubbers, “What, like you’re much better?” She objectively is.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here—that was your first?” She looks on the brink of giddy about it, like she’s taken something from him that he can never get back. 

“And when was the last time _you_ kissed anyone?”

She lifts her hand to scratch absently at her cheek. “I must’ve been thirteen or so. It’s been a while, but I’ve still got it, apparently. Not that I’ve got much competition in you.”

Thirteen or so, as old as she’d been when she’d started her Gym Challenge or just before. “Right.” He clears his throat. “I suppose I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“In more ways than one.” She smiles showily, turning almost smarmy. “You looking to get some practice in, then?”

Hatterene twists, finally, to look their way, and her presence is looming, casting candyfloss shade over them both. Bede meets her stare and thinks at her: _Thank you,_ and he answers Gloria with the cup of his hand under her jaw and the tentative bloom of his mouth on hers.

There’s a café in Wyndon with a panna cotta that’s to die for, if his sources don’t deceive him. He lays out an invitation of his own, and she obliges, jokes that she’s not quite had her fill of sweet for today and cackles when the blush burns on her suitor’s face.

Hatterene hovers between them like a chaperone, and when Gloria refuses the last bite, Bede hands it off to her.


End file.
